Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.

SIRIUS 293: Jean Michel Bernard – Générique Stephane ++ The Buff Medways – Troubled Mind ++ Condo Fucks – Gudbuy T’Jane ++ Richard Swift – Drakula (Hey Man!) ++ The Blue Rondos – Baby I Go For You ++ The Skygreen Leopards – Johnny’s Theme ++ Swamp Rats – Louie Louie ++ Dead Moon – Walking On My Grave ++ The Strange Boys – A Man You’ve Never Known ++ Natural Child – The Jungle ++ Harlem – Witchgreens ++ Black Lips – Not A Problem ++ The Emperors – I Want My Woman ++ The One Way Streets – We All Love Peanut Butter ++ The Warlocks – I Love You ++ The Chocolate Watchband – It’s All Over Now Baby Blue ++ Bedlam’s Offspring – I’ll Be There ++ Michelle’s Menagerie – Stay Away ++ The Swamp Rats – I’m Going Home ++ Weekends – Want You ++ Unknown – Voodoo ++ Bob Vidone & The Rhythm Rockers – Weird ++ The Cramps – TV Set ++ Jay Reatard – Hammer I Miss You ++ Rob Jo Star Band – I Call On One’s Muse ++ Donnie & Joe Emerson – Give Me The Chance ++ The Liminanas – Je Suis Une Go-Go Girl ++ The Mad Daddy – Jet Speed Saucer Blast ++ The Velvet Underground – Lady Godiva’s Operation ++ The Shangri-Las – How Pretty Can You Get? ++ Fleur De Lys – Circles ++ Dave Davies – Creeping Jean (mono mix) ++ The Peoples Temple – More For The Masses ++ Bo Diddley – Bo Diddley ++ Charlotte Leslie – Les Filles C’est Fait ++  Jacques Dutronc – J’ai Mis Un Tigre Dans Ma Guitare ++ The Graham Bond Organisation – Hear Me Calling Your Name ++ The Shadows – Scotch On The Socks ++ The Headcoatees – Meet Jacqueline ++ The Fondettes – The Beatles Are In Town ++ Beatle-Ettes – Only Seventeen ++ The Bush – Feeling Sad And Lonely ++ Los Saicos – Come On ++ David Bowie – Janine (BBC Session) ++ Reigning Sound – I Walk By Your House ++ The Rock*A*Teens – Black Metal Scars ++ Twin Peaks – Ocean Blue

*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.
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It’s been more than half a century since John Fahey made his first recordings, kicking off what he called the “American Primitive” or Takoma School of acoustic guitar playing — a movement that today appears to be as vibrant and vital as ever. Fahey still casts a long shadow, of course, but the music is a constantly growing and changing thing, with creative young guitarists like Daniel Bachman and William Tyler injecting new life and veterans like Don Bikoff and Harry Taussig emerging from the mists of obscurity. Somewhere in between, you’ll find solo guitar practitioners like Glenn Jones and Chuck Johnson who have been quietly honing their craft over decades and who have both released masterpieces this spring.

Although Jones got his start in the unclassifiable Cul de Sac, he’s become known over the years as one of the foremost Takoma School scholars, having overseen the release of unheard Fahey material (as well as some recordings by Robbie Basho). But Jones is no mere imitator when it comes to his own music. Opening and closing with the soft tinkling of wind chimes, My Garden State is a masterful LP — meditative, delicate and subtle. Those adjectives might translate to some as “boring” but believe me, this is a positively riveting record, as Jones spins beautiful webs with guitar and banjo. “Bergen County Farewell” offers three-and-a-half-minutes of perfectly bittersweet fingerpicked melancholy, and “Alcoeur Gardens,” wherein Jones duets with a distant thunderstorm, might just be the most quietly devastating thing you’ll hear in 2013.

MP3: Glenn Jones :: Bergen County Farewell

Chuck Johnson’s first recordings (released under the name Ivanovich in the late 90s) were improv guitar pieces. But his new Three Lobed release, Crows In The Basilica, doesn’t sound remotely made up on the spot — these solo guitar compositions have an almost architectural feel to them, transfixing the listener with their intricate structures. Johnson draws on everything from ancient Appalachian melodies to Chinese folk songs, in the process creating a hauntingly powerful dreamscape. The crystalline 12-string arpeggios of “Wild Geese Descend On Level Sand” will stop you in your tracks. Crows is also just a plain fantastic sounding LP — put this one on the turntable and it’s like you’ve got Johnson playing a private concert in your living room.

MP3: Chuck Johnson :: Wild Geese Descend On Level Sand

Since 2005, the best way to keep up with what’s new with the Takoma School has been to scoop up the Tompkins Square label’s indispensable Imaginational Anthem compilations, which seem to get better and better with each volume. Vol. 6 shakes things up a bit — it’s a prequel of sorts, gathering some choice proto-American Primitive instrumental solo guitar recordings by Sam McGee, Bayless Rose, Sylvester Weaver and others from the 1920s and 30s. If you’re even remotely interested in Fahey and his acolytes, this is a fascinating document, an essential glimpse of the style’s roots. But beyond that, it’s just a great listen, as wonderful a collection of “old time” folk/blues music as I’ve heard in several years. The transfers of these vintage 78s are marvelous — there’s the ubiquitous hiss and crackle, sure, but otherwise the sounds are bright and crisp, broadcasted to the 21st century from a long gone era. It’s nothing short of a miracle. words/ t wilcox

MP3: Sylvester Weaver :: Guitar Rag

Previously: Imaginational Anthem: Volume 5

Reading about Henry Flynt can be a little intimidating. The guy is described as an “avant garde minimalist” and “anti-art activist,” and is often mentioned in the same breath as LaMonte Young, Tony Conrad and the Fluxus movement. Flynt himself says: “”I aspire to a beauty which is ecstatic and perpetual, while at the same time being concretely human and emotionally profound.” None of this should scare you off. Flynt’s music is very, very fun, as demonstrated fully by his chooglin’ avant-hillbilly double LP Graduation, freshly reissued on wax by Superior Viaduct.

Recorded between 1975 and 1980, this is an eccentric, singular piece of work, to be sure, but it’s also infectious as hell. Over the course of eight loose-limbed tracks, Flynt re-imagines wide swathes of American music, blending Appalachian folk, Nashville countrypolitan, Lower East Side folk rock, experimental classical music and deep disco grooves. The end result is well-nigh impossible to pin down, but you can slot Graduation next to Arthur Russell’s similarly adventurous genre hops from around the same period. The nonstop boogie of “Lonesome Train Dreams” and the mutant disco hoedown of “No Rights” are highlights, but the whole thing is worth your time. Things reach the outer regions of the cosmos during the shimmering 19-minute “Celestial Music,” but, as Flynt notes in the liners “a bluesy-country sound still comes through.” t wilcox

A clutch of North Carolina albums have been on my mind of late. Hiss Golden Messenger’s Haw is the third corner of a triangle that started with the solitary winter blues of 2010’s Bad Debt and more full-flowered folk-rock of Poor Moon in 2011. The three albums cover a similar surface area, a haunted little patch of earth that I’m often wary to get too close to. It’s funny: a friend of mine recently called Hiss Golden Messenger “accessible,” though it’s more like the old trope of something pleasant-sounding telling you terrible things.  Haw starts out with the busted soul of “Red Rose Nantahala,” before detouring to the circuital ground plan of “Hat Of Rain,” a revisionist soundtrack of sorts to an imagined Druid ceremony. This is some of HGM tunesmith Mike Taylor’s deepest, darkest stuff. Be warned.

It may be a stretch to call Golden Gunn a “North Carolina record,” though it too seems to find a genesis in the Piedmont, when Three Lobed label head Cory Rayborn suggested a collaboration between Mike Taylor and the Brooklyn guitarist Steve Gunn. “We had a lot of the same influences and were into the same shit,” Taylor told AD back in February. “Basically, JJ Cale.”

Though Cale surely looms large, the real patron saint of Golden Gunn is a hard-up trucker named Dickie, a character cooked up on a long car ride by Taylor, Gunn, and liner notes scribe, Brendan Greaves (of NC label Paradise of Bachelors, which released Haw and will put out Gunn’s forthcoming Time Off in June).

Taylor and Gunn traded the tapes back and forth from North Carolina to Brooklyn (where HGM partner Scott Hirsch also assisted heavily), and the album sways from Taylor’s cosmic country soul to Gunn’s Takoma School guitar style. Then there’s the places where they deftly meet in the middle: the instrumental “Lal’s Song,” which wouldn’t have been out of place on a Cowboy record, or “From A Lincoln Continental,” a soul-jazz Curtis Mayfield-ian slice of slow funk, or the chilled-out desert boogie woogie of “The Sun Comes Up A Purple Diamond.”

Golden Gunn came out quietly in a limited edition of 995 LPs on Record Store Day, but don’t sleep on this one. words/ d inman

Related: Wooden Wand Interviews Hiss Golden Messenger

New York, New York: that’s one hell of a shadow you cast. The classic image of the city — that dark and terrifying Sodom where lawlessness and creativity join in a thrilling dance, the place where anything awful is possible and where people get off on that very possibility — it looms over the psyche of alienated teenagers everywhere. The promise of so much chaos and unchecked weirdness testifies to a strange kind of romance and freedom. Make it there and you can make it anywhere, sure, but if you make it there — as in, if you can physically get there — you won’t feel at home anywhere else. You don’t have to have ever heard of Wayne County or Lydia Lunch or even The Velvet Underground & Nico to understand and be compelled by the allure of urbanity.

Which might be why all of the best New York records these days are being made by Southerners, those perennial outsiders who still want to belong. Texas transplants Parquet Courts scored big at the end of last year with Light Up Gold, a masterful slab of post-punk that took its location in time and space seriously and was unafraid to ground itself in both the geographic and aesthetic particulars of the city. And now we have Deerhunter, that amorphous group of noise-waifs from Atlanta, and Monomania, a brittle record whose straight-to-tape recording doesn’t even bother trying to contain its own paranoia. It’s the sound of that wild, churning creativity curdling into nightmare.

Monomania is culled almost entirely from a massive archive of tapes created by head Hunter Bradford Cox while house-sitting for Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger. In a recent interview with Pitchfork, Cox tells Larry Fitzmaurice that he’d spend his nights drinking Jamaican rum with MGMT, then cabbing it back to Friedberger’s place to record late into the night. “There was some bad, personal shit that really set me back,” Cox says. “I made a lot of music that year, but I stopped caring if it was ever heard.”

The songs that make up Monomania were recorded a year or so later with all of Deerhunter at Cox’s back, and the album reflects a distinct urban claustrophobia that’s both geographical and emotional. In “Leather Jacket II,” guitars spill over one another, tripping in and out of rhythm. Someone shouts something about waking the neighbors before the weight of the song’s momentum pushes through its middle, burying the rhythm track in a rubble of noise. Elsewhere, the group smuggle in a counterfeit of Blues Image’s “Ride Captain Ride,” calling it “Dream Captain” and laughing as they highlight its deficiencies. It would seem like a cruel joke on the whole grooving gig of happy seventies rock if it weren’t so damn catchy — it practically shoves you into the discomfort of singing along to a line as gross as “Dream Captain/Take me on your ship/Dream Captain/Take me if you wish.”

But that’s what Monomania does again and again, returning to the wreckage at the intersection of irony and sincerity, smuggling in parts from one in the guise of the other. “Pensacola,” the album’s best song, is Deerhunter’s latest triumphal Strokes knockoff, but where those actual New Yorkers are at their best when slagging off any kind of attachment, Deerhunter one-up them before the song even begins. For Gulf Coasters, even those who’ve left the region, that Panhandle resort town is freighted with memories of childhood vacations or high-school and college spring breaks. For a certain type of person (one who, let’s say, Cox might not have shared space with comfortably in his Georgia high school), Pensacola has its own attendant escapist myth that’s not all that different in quality from the ones spawned by New York. It’s a raunchy paradise, too, and Cox, writing all alone in the living room of someone else’s Brooklyn dream, knows it. It’s strange to hear it buried there in the rubble of all those New York bricks, stranger still to hear it from my own apartment here in Chicago, as a Louisianan doing his best to pass as a cultured urbanite. How uneasy, and yet how at home, it makes me to hear Bradford Cox longing to hop a bus and escape to Pensacola. words/ m garner

Our weekly two hour show on SIRIUS/XMU, channel 35, can be heard twice every Friday – Noon EST with an encore broadcast at Midnight EST.

SIRIUS 292: Jean Michel Bernard – Générique Stephane ++ Apple & The Three Oranges – Curse Upon The World ++ Bill Withers – Better Off Dead ++ The Dirtbombs – Livin’ For The City ++ The Don Ezekiel Combination – Ire ++ Chuck Jackson – I Like Everything About You ++ The Soul Lifters – Hot Funky & Sweaty ++ Max Roach With The J.C. White Singers – Motherless Child ++ Bessie Jones – So Glad I’m Here ++ The Staples Singers – This May Be The Last Time ++ The Rolling Stones – I Just Want To See His Face ++ Mississippi Fred McDowell – I Wish I Was In Heaven Sitting Down ++ The Mighty Hannibal – Hymn No. 5 ++ Lee Moses – California Dreaming ++ Muddy Waters – She’s Alright ++ Michael Kiwanuka – Tell Me A Tale ++ Chubby Checker – Goodbye Victoria ++ The Ify Jerry Krusade – Everybody Likes Something Good ++ Dutch Rhythm And Steel Show Band: Down By The River ++ Fatback Band – Goin’ To See My Baby ++ The Last Poets – Time ++ Darondo – Let My People Go ++ Mor Thiam – Ayo Ayo Nene ++ Moses Dillard – Tribute To Wes ++ The Hydrades – Rough Rider ++ The Meters – Handclapping Song ++ Johnny & The Attractions – I’m Moving On ++ Andersons All Stars – Intensified Girls ++ The Ify Jerry Krusade – Nwantinti/Die Die ++ Jack Wade & The Soul Searchers – Searching For Soul ++ Tim Maia – Nobody Can Live Forever ++ The Daktaris – Super Afro-Beat ++ The Budos Band – Up From The South ++ Serge Gainsbourg – Requiem Pour Un Con ++ Vanessa Parads – Paradis ++ Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

*You can listen, for free, online with the SIRIUS three day trial — just submit an email address and they will send you a password.
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weeeeiiiirrrrddd. Hawkins’ “Constipation Blues” with Serge Gainsbourg . Indeed, an inspired pairing.

Lagniappe (la·gniappe) noun ˈlan-ˌyap,’ – 1. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. 2. Something given or obtained as a gratuity or bonus.

The Lagniappe Sessions return with Mikal Cronin, whose sophomore solo LP and Merge Records debut, MCII, lands at your favorite record store today. Five months into 2013, I can tell you it’s one of my favorite records this year. Below, the multi-instrumentalist concentrates on the ukelele — paying tribute to a pair of FM radio staples from his youth. Cronin, in his own words, below.
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I recorded these songs a little while ago to send to my girlfriend when we were living in different states. We share an affinity for cheesy 80s and 90s pop songs, and since she can play ukelele well we could trade cover songs back and forth. On my computer I titled the album these songs belong to as “(F)ukin’ around with Mikal Cronin”… which I stand behind as a mildly funny name for a dumb uke cover album.

MP3: Mikal Cronin :: I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) (The Proclaimers)

The trickiest part of recording this song is not trying to sing with their awesome thick Scottish accents (may be my favorite accent of all the world). My favorite part of this recording is when the phone rings right before the break. This is a really really brilliant simple and affective song.

MP3: Mikal Cronin :: Kiss Me (Sixpence None the Richer)

I’m not sure if I first heard this on the radio or in the movie She’s All That. Either way I was probably 11 or 12 and it would periodically get stuck in my head up until today. Looking it up on wikipedia right now it was stuck on number 2 in the charts behind TLC’s “No Scrubs” and Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca”. That’s pretty rough. My favorite part of this recording is the out of tune melodica solo.

Aquarium Drunkard Lagniappe Sessions Archives / original illustration for AD by Ben Towle.